Chapter Sixty-Six
The silence that settled over the compound in the days following the departure was a heavy, physical thing. It wasn't the quiet of a peaceful afternoon; it was the suffocating, tense silence of a house waiting for a bomb to go off. The fog that had cleared on the morning they left returned with a vengeance, wrapping itself around the high iron gates and swallowing the tops of the pine trees until the world outside the fence completely ceased to exist.
I quickly found out that adjusting to life without Jake wasn't just hard—it felt completely impossible.
For the first forty-eight hours, my body remained on a cruel, automatic loop. Every time the heavy metal door of the bedroom clicked, my head would snap up, my heart doing a wild, hopeful leap before the cold reality cr
